Last week Dorothy Allison was Mississippi State University’s Writer-in-Residence for the 2015-2016 school year. For a week she handed her time to the students of MSU and between scheduled lunches, public readings and necessary amounts of sleep she worked closely with fledgling writers to improve their craft. 
  While Allison was able to spend large amounts of time working closely with creative writing students in the English department, much of what she had to say about the process of becoming a successful writer is valuable to anyone interested in pursuing writing. 
  Her advice, distilled, comes down to this; get edited, get into some workshops, believe in yourself and do not get ahead of yourself. 
   “Make the best story you can make,” Allison said. But then she warned, “It could involve cutting a third of the work or even changing the points of view completely.”
  Allison said during her time as an unpublished young writer, or “baby writer,” as she called them, she found herself working for an editor who she said was ruthless.
 Allison said she would give her entire lists of words she was not allowed to use simply to force her to work around them and grow as a writer. Editors, she said, are essential to creating a prolific writer.
   “If you are good, they will make you great,” Allison said.
  In addition to finding editors for creative works, Allison said workshops are important, as while an individual can certainly hone their craft to their potential without them, workshops and other close working environments shave years off of the process. 
  The reason Allison said feedback is crucial to becoming a good writer is it is important to learn to receive criticism well and use it to improve before you (hopefully) hit print.
  “When you publish there is no way to control how people are going to read it,” Allison said.  
  While outside review is certainly a huge aspect of improving as a writer, Allison said the other half of the battle is internal. 
“Most writers have ego issues,” Allison said off-handedly. 
  Which, she said, can be a good and bad thing. Egos get in the way when instead of accepting and benefiting from criticism a writer bucks against it. Displaying their work, also, can make a writer feel very vulnerable if they are not able to separate their feeling of self-worth from the current state of their work. 
   Allison said she had to swallow her own ego in her younger years, but also acknowledges the importance of knowing when to take a stand for your creative direction. 
 Much of her work, particularly Bastard out of Carolina, revolves around rural, southern environments filled with people who speak in a very distinctive dialect. Now, it is not uncommon to find true-to-life depictions of people’s grammar and speaking patterns in creative works but Allison said when she was starting out many of her copy editors pushed her to ‘clean up’ her character’s speech. 
   She disagreed, saying her characters and the people they were inspired or based off of, simply did not speak the crisp, correct version of english her editors wanted her to run.
   “That’s when you have to have an ego strong enough to question and stand up to editors,” Allison said. 
  Allison, 69, said she believes in experimental literacy and was lucky to be writing during the boom of independent magazines that would grant young upstart writers like herself the allowances necessary to create completely new movements in the written world. 
   “It was a very different moment in American Literature than from anything before it,” Allison said. “So much permission was being given. People were in love with radical literature.”
  Allison went on to say writers of this generation have a similar advantage due to the prevalence of the internet and the multitude of different ways an independent writer can broadcast their work to an audience. 
  As a sign- off, and on a half-joking, mostly serious note, Allison said she would tell any student today ‘we are in trouble,’ that as a whole we run the risk of making actions in ignorance rather than rationality and that as a nation we need to watch ourselves.  However, she quickly follows it up by saying she believes through it all the good voices will shine through and with a little constructive criticism we will be well on our way to a better tomorrow.